The Predictable Life Of An Ordinary Man–Dogged, Respectable, And Without Epiphany

Herb Pollitt, well into late middle age and crumbling at the edges, leaking, and wondering where time went, tried in a hurry-up offense to sort out what’s what, the answer to life’s conundrum, what on earth he was doing here, what had he done, and where in bloody hell was he going. Or, as old Jews said, ‘Too soon old, too late schmart’.

Herb was a pessimist, figuring it was time to prepare for the Great Unknown, to get one’s spiritual ducks in line, to sort out one’s debts, deceptions, and wrong doings; to make amends and confession , and to look to the Infinite for tolerance if not forgiveness. Most of his friends had no such stinging self-recriminations.  Life was a hand of cards played as they lay.  They were lucky in that regard – they could rake in the chips – and never thought either about their good fortune or the misfortune of others.  Such was randomness.

‘A life worth living is a life worth reliving’, said Bendix La Follette shortly before collapsing onto his last manuscript about life, memory, and ‘temporal integrity’.  He had always championed the good life, the life well-led, the life of secular and seductive charms and pleasures, and one of no regrets; and was about to write his swan song, his final statement, when he toppled into the ink-stained, handwritten folio on which he considered his most important work.  Herb had read La Follette in college but dismissed him as an academic crank; but what young, virile, heady male would think differently.  Now that Herb was poking into his last decades, the old man made more sense, depressingly so because Herb had not lived life to the fullest, had more regrets than satisfactions, and was now simply pottering along to the end of the line.  La Dolce Vita had passed him by, he had been passed over too many times to recount, and his later years, far from illuminating, were simply a collection of odd ailments. 

Vladimir Nabokov was a self-described memorist. The present is only milliseconds, he said, the future only a possibility, but the past a long, stretching, full and rich emotional and historical pastiche.  Those who choose to fix the past in memory and displace the venal concerns of the present and the idle gossip of the future, extend their lives. True enough, reflected Herb, but what was there in his dimly lit past that was even worth remembering? He had no idyllic summers at a dacha in the birch woods, no memories of St Tropez, Gstaad, or Paris salons. 

He had no particularly bad memories, only regrets; but they too were as common as lint – sexual opportunities missed, adventures deferred, lackadaisical academics, prayerlessness, indifference – and not to be dwelled upon. He had no great loves lost, no Arabian princesses in his past, no Himalayan peaks, no five-star restaurants.  Reliving a predictable, unremarkable, and totally forgettable life was hardly worth the effort. 

What about the literary bookends – writers like Dickens who have written about their birth and childhood and long trajectory through adulthood with little thought to purpose or meaning?  Surely there must be a lesson there, that no life is dismissible and forgettable.  Yet Pip was a young man of great expectations, delivered from obscurity to society, emotionally stunted but finally moral and patient.  His life was anything but ordinary, nor was that of David Copperfield or Charles Darnay.  Lives may be examined from beginning to end in fiction, but they are never ordinary lives.

Richard Ford, novelist and author of The Sportswriter and a number of sequels, comes the closest to writing about lives without adventure and complication. Frank Bascombe, his main character, has deliberately chosen an ordinary life – not just familiar, but irremediably without interest.  If life is no more than predictable bumps in the road and minor short circuits, then an embrace is worth far more than a rejection.  The books are hard to read because of their monotony and Bascombe’s deliberate refusal to act or react.  His dogged acceptance of the hand he has been dealt is frustrating and inhibiting.  ‘Do something!’ we yell at the page.

But even with a writer as determinedly removed as Ford, there is inherent drama.  We hope for Bascombe’s reanimation after years of suppressed feelings about his son’s death; for some remittance and relief from his self-imposed emotional penumbra.  Ford asks us to be as dogged as Bascombe and see if he is resurrected.

Herb Pollitt’s life had no interior drama or dialogue; and his only solace was an ironic twist on Tolstoy’s sad conclusion after a life of searching for meaning.  If tens of millions of people before him had believed in God, and millions now subscribed to the same faith, then mightn't there be something to it?  If billions of people lived lives of cradle to grave unremarkable routine, then wasn’t there something to it? Was meaning only derived from epiphany?

Old age, however, loosens all adhesives and without the solace of those pedestrian distractions that kept him anchored and gave him some sense of meaning, he became morose.  He began factoring longevity into purchases – dental implants, new refrigerators, an upgraded, renovated house would outlast him by decades, so what was the point? Where was alleviation? Who was there to help?  If misery is self-inflicted, there is no alleviation or recourse.

Life is always lived on at least two planes, and Herb was fortunately able to slip between his.  His metaphysical doubts were not so strong and persistent that he couldn’t enjoy a round of golf. Yet that niggling, pestering, unpleasant thought of what would be his unremarked death after an unremarkable life never seemed to go away.

John Updike’s Rabbit At Rest, the final volume of a trilogy about Harry Angstrom, a simple man, is all about Herb Pollitt.  Angstrom has little education, less sophistication, and has ended up retired in Florida to a numbing existence of warm weather, golf, and incidental acquaintances.  He, like Pollitt had dreams and expectations as a young man, found them lacking and disappointing as sustenance or promise.  His life was not about regret but surviving.  He disliked his son, his wife, and his grandchildren – annoying people he was stuck with.   Their increasing demands on him -  neutering, emasculating, and infuriating – push him out of his misery and to suicide.   He does not need to find out what’s what, nor has he any sense of the need for the search.  He knows that through circumstance, ignorance, and a peculiar stubbornness, his life is not worth living.  He is heroic for having carried this understanding for so long, for refusing to capitulate his integrity, and for realizing that for a simple man, death was the only possible answer.  The expression of will, said Nietzsche, is the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world; and Rabbit Angstrom knew this implicitly.  His premature death was obvious.

Herb Pollitt never gave any thought to suicide – he was too normal for that – and so lived out the rest of his life like the rest of us dutifully, resignedly, and predictably. 

Life In A Cubicle Or Help! Get Me Out Of Here!–Life’s Nasty But Desperately Needed Boxes

There once was a Senior Vice President of a well-known Washington consulting firm who tried to explain to her staff the reasoning behind the new office configuration – the elimination of all individual offices and the creation of ‘congenial, cooperative’ work stations, i.e. cubicles.  It was all for the sake of increased collaboration, integration, and respect.  Ideas in such an open office environment would flow more easily and each individual would flourish.  Stagnancy, ‘silo’ thinking, and piggish rooting would be gone.  A brave, new world she said.

Of course there were objections and not a few of her minions saw the irony of her illiterate reference to the dystopian world of Aldous Huxley, a world manipulated by overseers through genetic engineering, eugenics, and environmental ‘adjustment’ to become more ideal, more practical, and more cooperative.  This idea of reconfiguration was no less that Huxley’s.  Both had little to do with individual benefit, but collective productivity in the interests of management. Huxley’s society is one in which power is concentrated in the hands of a few, communication of information is meticulously managed, and endless distractions prevent people from thinking, reasoning, or imagining.

Cubicles were the first alterations of normal reality towards Huxley’s authoritarian world.  They were Skinner-esque, conditioning elements to exert communal authority in the guise of a happier work experience.  They were Orwellian in their double-think, positioned as means of collaboration and examples of the value of human interaction, but designed to eliminate individual thinking.  The Senior Vice President was eloquent in her praise of the new work environment and broke the news of the reorganization one day over pizza.

“The Open Work Environment”, she began, “is an opportunity.  For far too long we have labored on our own plot of land – our little kitchen gardens tended with our own water and care.  We loved our tender leaves of lettuce, our carrots, and our modest patch of spinach; but we admired our neighbor’s tall tomato plants, winding green beans, and flowering squash so much more.  Now with one large communal garden we can all share in the planting, the care and the harvest; and the bounty will be far more and far better than any one of us could produce individually”.

One senior staff member wasn’t fooled by the SVP’s folksy homily.  He had labored for five years in the Ronald Reagan Building downtown – a nightmarish, Kafka-esque warren of cubicles that stretched for city blocks, floor upon floor, from east to west, avenue to avenue. Acres of beehives and post office box offices; and one of the reasons he had joined this  relatively small firm was to escape the assembly line, depressing environment of RR. “It was hell”, he said.

Any survivor of the Reagan Building had the same stories to tell – tales of confinement, constant noise, interruption, bad lighting, and dry, stale air.  The layout was scary. Whole floors of identically small cubes. The only difference between the modern office cubicle and the sweat shops of the Lower East Side was the machine – a computer rather than a sewing machine.

Despite management’s flowery, inspirational appeal, the workers were having none of it. The era of the modern cubicle coincided with the I-Phone, and cubicle workers simply plugged in and tuned out everything and everybody in the office.  If these young assistants were isolated before reorganization, they were ten times more removed from communal sharing than ever before.  Almost in spite, they cluttered their cubes with stuffed animals, raver nipples, Jim Morrison posters, and Indian tie-dye.  The floors were stacked with files and books. The desks jammed with coffee cups, pencil-holders, and faux paperweights; and the flimsy composition cube dividers pinned with baby pictures, beach pix, and Mom.  The effect was of a hundred cluttered playrooms.

Management was having none of it, and issued circulars saying, “Forthwith, cubicles shall remain clean and uncluttered; and employees shall not be distracted from their work by extraneous diversions”.

Social critic Harold Rosen has written,

The sad news is, given the ubiquity [of cubicles], how unhappy they seem to be making us: One 1997 survey found that 93 percent of cubicle workers would prefer an alternative, and a 2013 study found that they had "the highest rates of unhappiness with their work setup.

Of course cube workers are unhappy with their workplace environment.  Who wouldn’t prefer an alternative?  Yet it is no coincidence that workplaces in essence haven’t changed since the days of the sweat shop.  Industrial chicken factory workspace is a logically efficient configuration of labor force whose union clout has disappeared, whose supply exceeds demand, and whose skills are easily replaceable.

The idea of conformity, fitting into cubicles is not new, and Brave New World written in 1932 presaged the worst abuses of Soviet communism – the ill-fated, destructive program to neuter independent thought, expression, and activity; to force conformity to a socialist, communal ideal, and to imprison, kill, or intimidate anyone who objected.

The free world celebrated the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Empire, and the dismantling of an unmanning, brutal, punitive autocracy; but such celebration is disingenuous at best and ignorant at worst.  Even the freest society is inherently and routinely structured to benefit those who manage it.  While the Hindu caste system has a spiritual basis – in a world of illusion and false promises, it is better to be confined, limited, and ordered so that the mind and soul are not distracted from their search for identity with God.  More cynical historians have said that the caste system which characterized Aryan rule had nothing to do with spiritual value but control.  The more docile, complaisant, and accepting the populace was, the easier it would be to govern.

Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov challenges the returned Christ and says that he, Christ, has deluded mankind in his elevating message of spiritual salvation.  Rather than alleviating hunger, suffering, and penury, Jesus promised only a heavenly reward.  Through me, and only through me, he said, will you find true peace and salvation.  The people, Ivan went on, cheated by their presumed Lord, wanted only Miracles, Mystery, and Authority if no one attended to their earthly needs. Christ’s words to the Devil during his temptation in the desert enabled the rise of the Catholic Church which for centuries manipulated the faithful and created a world power of untold wealth and power.  We create our own destiny, said Ivan, we the credulous; and are satisfied with only the trappings of something more existential.  We deserve what we get.

The idea of individualism – true, pure, individualism – exists only in fiction.  The film Jeremiah Johnson is the story of a mountain man living alone, surviving well, needing no one and very little to survive happily.  The lone mountain man is the American; an expression of determined, righteous independence; the embodiment of freedom.  Yet with the exception of those very few on the margins, life is one of cubicles of our own making.  We subscribe to churches, aggressively ambitious corporations, schools, community organizations, causes.  We not only put up with their insistence on conformity, we need it.  We would flounder without social norms of behavior, the camaraderie and justification of groups, strictures, laws, principles, and obligations. 

Of course there is nothing new in this.  Human beings have grouped themselves for efficiency, self-protection, and aggression.  What is new or at least rarely noted, is the depth of the need for belonging, acceptance, and social validation.  We may crow about freedom and liberty, but we want nothing of the sort.  The physical cubicle is only the most visible sign of self-abnegation.  Without the cubicle we would still be willingly beholden to a bottom-line, unremittingly demanding and self-serving management and Board of Directors.  It is no surprise that, as Rosen has illustrated, that the vast majority of workers in cubicles want out.  It is not pleasant to work under such debilitating conditions; but worse to be forced to realize the most nasty bits of our human nature – the need to conform and to belong.

One of the most respected leaders of the progressive movement in America and one to whom all comers turned to for advice, counsel, and support was a Big Tenter par excellence and devised ingenious financial instruments to centralize donor funds. Everyone with a gripe, whether it be against the One Percent, Wall Street, Walmart, or the XL Pipeline, contributed the The Global Warming Fund of America was welcome.  He was a PR genius who understood the wisdom of what he called ‘idea collectivization’. By identifying and stressing the links between the many and variegated progressive causes in America and proudly raising the Global Warming banner overall, he made millions. He was the best carny barker that America had ever produced.  “Come one, come all”, he shouted and pointed at the great multicolored circus tent behind him.  “Its all inside, my brothers and sisters.  Salvation for you and the world.”

By joining in ‘The Movement’ one could conveniently forget that one was only substituting a Big Tent for a cubicle, and that they were as indoctrinated, manipulated, and directed no less by Progressive gurus than Senior Vice Presidents.

The problem with cubicles is that they are too obvious.  While they are little more than physical reminders of our need for social order, discipline, and authority, they crossed the line.  They are too harsh reminders of our sorry lack of individualism; but we go to cubicles on Sunday, send our children to cubicles every Monday morning, and harness up in cubicles to fight Global Warming, Injustice, and Greed on the weekends.

What a waste of time.  How much time and effort we spend trying to deny our very human nature and the thousands of years of history which affirm it.  Sit quietly and realize that life in your office cubicle is no worse than any other.

Nobody To Hate–The Biden Presidency And The Deflated Santa Claus Balloons Of The Left

Ooooh, it felt so good to hate Donald Trump, an unexpected gift to progressives who could never gin up much resentment, bile, or downright calumny for the likes of either of the Bushes or even Ronald Reagan.  Hatred of Nixon came close, and many a Washington liberal laughed at his five o’clock shadow, his in-your-face V finger salute, and cookies-and-milk wife.

They followed Watergate like an afternoon soap opera, howled against his dilatory insistence that he would end the War in Vietnam, considered him a war criminal and corrupter of the Constitution; but nothing, no one, and never before was there such bilious, intemperate, inchoate hatred of any President like Donald Trump.

Of course he thrived on such crazed, hysterical behavior.  The more the Left ranted on about his misogyny, racism, and homophobia, the more he threw it back in their face.  To hear him talk, liberals were twisted, deformed caricatures addled academics seduced by their own faux intellectualism; hopeless, Utopian, idealists; anti-historical dreamers; and fools.  He gave as good as he got, and the four years of the Trump presidency were the most fun ever.  

Never had the back pages of the New York Review of Books, airing nasty he-said, she-said smears and retorts, had America had so much fun.  The Left, desperately serious and determined to defame, discredit, and dishonor this smarmy, retrograde, hack politician and evil-doer, provided the lines.  They were the producers of the vaudeville stage, the facilitators, the eager, voluntary yes-men.   They, with their virulent hatred enabled Donald Trump and his best performances.

Trump had no patience for the Left’s sanctimony or preposterous righteousness.  For every holier-than-thou faux rectitude, Trump had a retort, a one-ups-manship par excellence.  The Black Lives Matter activists, to the Left the modern day Crusaders out to liberate Jerusalem from the heathen, but to Trump street bum criminal ne’er-do-wells with no higher purpose than to loot big screen TVs, phones, liquor, and computers.  

Gay rights advocates, to the Left the avant-garde of the New Wave of sexuality, on the front lines of the gender spectrum, the tsunami to finally inundate and destroy patriarchal sexual oppression; but to Trump sexual deviants and anti-Biblical apostates.  

Environmentalists to the Left were the Second Coming, the holy crusaders, the damning forces of right behavior, the sanctified barrier against human depredation.  To Trump they were tree-huggers, Chicken Little hysterics, and advocates without a sex life.

It was easy to love Donald Trump, a populist man of the people and enshrined example of lowbrow, bourgeois taste.  His supporters wanted no temperance, no ‘on the one hand, on the other’ considered opinions.  They wanted no Pablo Casals, Robert Frost, artsy-fartsy Rose Garden high-falutin’ posturing.  They wanted arm candy, yachts, resorts, braggadocio, silk suits, and insolence.  They wanted the Left to be humiliated for its European faux class and dismissive elitism.

It was also easy to hate him for this very dismissiveness, arrogance, and indifference to substance, things that mattered.  The Left hated him not only for his corrupt, incorrigible disgraceful character and personality, but for what he stood for – the white race, capitalist laissez-faire opportunism, and the foul indifference to hybrid sexuality. 

So the last four years have been ones of pure grand guignol, Barnum & Bailey big tops and side shows, vaudeville, carny barkers, snake oil salesmen, and Hollywood dream-makers.  Trump could have never asked for such a foil as progressive Democrats.  Had he faced Truman, Roosevelt, Carter, or even Bill Clinton, he would have had to write new scripts and screenplays, worked around national crises and searched for ways to ad hominem his opponents; but Jimmy Carter, all cardigans, love, and firesides would have been too easy a target; and Bill Clinton too much of an ally.  

Who, other than Bill Clinton could have invented Monica Lewinsky, ‘it depends on what is is’,  ‘I did not have sex with that woman’, and trailer trash sex with hookers? A political marriage made in heaven.

So, now what? With Trump gone, the air has gone out of the progressive balloon.  Liberal Democrats have defeated the enemy, removed the Evil One from office, and have cleared the decks for running; but politics abhors a vacuum.  Without hate, recriminations and virulent misogynist, racist, and homophobic messages, where is the party of Biden?

Oh yes, the country will return to ‘normal’; i.e. the dull, pedestrian, predictable agenda of love, participatory, compassionate community that Democrats have tried to impose on winners-and-losers capitalists, Biblical originalists, and apple-pie-and-motherhood Americans.

Trump country after four years of chattel-free expression, rejection of liberal cant and sanctimony, will not keep quiet.  Biden may have won the election but  by no means will he be courted.  His Rasputin, Kamala Harris, and her legions of liberal claques will give plenty of raw meat to the Right. They will soon see gay activism and gender-neutral sexuality spread throughout every public institution; private enterprise belittled; neutered, public education transformed; and gender-race-ethnicity first instituted as the de facto working principle of the New Democracy; and they will be incensed, motivated, and pissed.

The problem is not with the Right, but the Left.  It will be easy for conservatives to find something to hate.  Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will give them plenty; but what about the liberal, progressive Left?  With the defeat of Trump they have been left empty-handed.  A movement which has been motivated not by principles but by high-minded moral assumptions has nothing left to stand on.  The border wall? Taxes? Gender reform?  OK, good enough for backstory policy papers, but without juice, beef, and salsa.

Bob Mutter, a longtime liberal activist, suckled at the breast of William Sloane Coffin and his anti-war sycophants, weaned at the hands of the anti-nuclear peaceniks, and embraced by modern day feminists and environmentalists, is worried.  While there is still salience in the causes of international accord, global warming, and the persistently durable glass ceiling, no one opposes them.  There is no Donald Trump to question the science of historical meteorology, the chauvinistic oppression of women, or the forces of international anarchy.  The issues alone cause no ripples, no interest, no Nielsen ratings.  What is a good liberal to do?

Number One, politics won’t be fun anymore.  Come on, admit it, the last four years have been as great a show as ever conceived by American politics.  A trophy wife, a drop-dead gorgeous, Hollywood-ready daughter, a coterie of the rich and famous, all shamelessly paraded as political assets? What could be better? Who among the Right can be the next Salem witch to be burned at the stake?  No one.  The party is over.

Number two, progressive issues are bo-ring.  There is no way to Hollywoodize elementary school curriculum, soup kitchens, or diversity.  Now, if Hollywood could ever shed its progressive mantel, there might be a good story of Salvadoran refugees now members of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) the most violent street gang in Los Angeles. A ‘Clockers’ with regional, international flavor.  A story of hardship, flight, family responsibilities, crime, and redemption. But Hollywood will simply pull up, pull back, love Joe Biden and let him write dulling, soporiphic documentaries better suited to PBS.

So we are in for four ‘Presidential’ years, more of the same lukewarm predictable compassionate policies of the past.  It won’t take long for people to yearn for a return to the halcyon, circus Trump years.  Life is short, after all, and given the repetitive, predictable  cycles of history, don’t we really want more Donald Trumps?

Of course we do.